Two days before the weekend papers revealed bizarre images of our royal family delivering fascist salutes on a lawn all but wreathed in the golden glow of a crumbling empire, BBC4 broadcast its regular nostalgia trip for my generation. The August 1980 edition of Top of the Pops, shown last Thursday, was graced with the Skids, Elton John, Gary Numan and, to me, the godlike vision of David Bowie at No 1, singing Ashes to Ashes. But as the programme played out its final sequence, the usual panning shots of the audience produced a scene that even now has the capacity to shock.

Standing on a podium was a young man, vaguely “new wave” in dress, repeatedly raising his arm in an unmistakable “sieg heil”. Post-Jimmy Savile et al, the beleaguered BBC has had its work cut out editing versions of TOTPs which are broadcastable. As David Shariatmadari pointed out, another 1980 episode of the programme in which Roger Daltrey muttered “mind your backs” before a performance by the Village People, was edited – a sharp reminder of the passing of time, fashion and acceptability.

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How did this young man’s reflexive gesture, delivered with an almost equally audible snigger, get past them? Perhaps the fact that it did is an indicator of pop’s queasy relationship with politics and responsibility. Only four years before, in 1976, David Bowie himself was accused of using a similar salute when he arrived at Victoria Station in London. In what now looks like a set-up (a lesser god might have sued), Bowie was quoted as being supposedly in favour of a rightwing dictatorship. The Thin White Duke – whom I saw on stage on his apocalyptic Station to Station tour at Wembley that year – did indeed seem to invoke the uneasy glamour of totalitarianism. Was that just another persona for the shape-shifter?

Neither then, nor now, have Bowie’s personal politics had anything to do with those of the extreme right. But the way was open for Joy Division, formed that same year by confirmed Bowie fans, to use the name of a concentration camp brothel. Meanwhile, Malcolm McLaren, manager of the Sex Pistols, and his partner, Vivienne Westwood, designed bondage shirts screenprinted with swastikas, worn by Johnny Rotten. And in the infamous Bill Grundy Show TV interview with the Pistols in November 1976, one of their Bromley Contingent followers in attendance wears a very obvious swastika armband.

What naivety or stupidity was on display here? Which of us does not shudder at their earlier selves? Perhaps even the Queen is doing so now. I wonder particularly because I wore one of those Westwood bondage shirts. Yet I was an active member of the Anti-Nazi League, and when we marched to Victoria Park in east London for the Rock Against Racism festival in 1978, we were showered with bricks by sieg-heiling skinheads from warehouse windows.

I knew the power of such symbols. I knew what they meant for their victims

I was politically aware – ironically, punk had made me so. I knew the power of such symbols. I knew what they meant for their victims, among whom I would have been numbered. So did the Jewish Malcolm McLaren (although his fellow manager, and Jew, Bernie Rose, manager of the Clash, argued violently with him on the issue); and so did the situationist radical Tony Wilson, whose Factory Records was home to Joy Division.

As the front page (ab)use of the eight-year-old Queen raising her arm in that fated, freighted gesture proves, the fascination with fascism remains, as does its stain. That our idols may be complicit only speaks to a strange disconnection in our culture. Having written an admiring, although not uncritical biography of Noel Coward (a close friend of the Queen’s mother), I was still taken aback last year to discover evidence that he had performed at a British fascists carnival ball at the Hammersmith Palais in 1925.

When later interviewed about the madness of his mid-70s period, Bowie said his work then was about the sadness he felt in the world. Earlier this year, walking round Berlin, I wondered at the creative power that produced Bowie’s famous Berlin trilogy, Isherwood’s novels and Brecht’s plays. But I also saw the armed guards on the synagogues and on the Holocaust memorial.

Art can provoke, through transgression. It is not responsible. It does not commemorate. That duty lies with the rest of us.